


Cartography

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Gyakuten Saiban | Ace Attorney
Genre: F/M, Half-Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-03
Updated: 2008-03-03
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:57:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I don't think you're old enough to quite appreciate what it means to lose everything."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cartography

-

 

Sometimes -- and it never failed to stop his heart, cramp it up all small and terrified inside his chest like a raisin -- she would push herself up, her top hat fluttering on the end of the ribbon she had tied under her chin, managing to stay on the back of his bike with the power of her thighs, and spread her arms as wide as her smile, like she was flying.

He would purposely jiggle the handlebars so that she had to grab onto him, hands warm and grasping on his back. He felt safer that way.

 

...

 

He took to picking her up after school, parking his bike behind the school buses and the minivans and lingering around the herd of kindergarten parents. Many of them were only a few years older than he was.

He did it in part because he was usually stir-crazy by three in the afternoon and needed something to do, and in part because of the smile on her face when she saw him, like each time she wasn't expecting him there. It was both gratifying and insulting, which was not an unusual combination, coming from Trucy.

"Did you know you're the only high schooler who comes out those doors?" he told her once, after they'd had that routine for a couple months.

"Really?" she twisted her head around, but it wasn't that hard; they waded through a sea of elementary students, most of whom didn't even come up to their shoulders. "Huh. I guess I never noticed. I'm just a freshman, after all."

She seemed distracted; her chin lowered, the bounce in her step more understated. He jostled her and ducked his head to peer at her face. "Are you okay?"

She flashed a scattered smile at him. "Of course I am!" she said, downright chipper. She cast another look over her shoulder, towards the parking lot and -- he assumed -- the exit the older kids used. "Although," she confided with no additional prompting from him. "I don't think my classmates like me very much."

Apollo barked with laughter. "Why not?" he said, forgetting in his surprise that she hadn't made the most favorable first impression on him, either, and he wasn't in high school. It was a little jarring to realize he was now close enough to her to be blind-sided.

"They won't tell me," Trucy jutted out her bottom lip to show just what she thought of that. "But. They can't hide themselves from me. I'm pretty sure it has something to do with you being my best friend."

Apollo almost stopped dead in his tracks, suddenly not liking where this was going. "Me?" he echoed uneasily, sticking his hands in his pockets.

"Well, I talk about you a lot," she said brightly. "My friends all know you're a lawyer. When they ask me if I want to hang out after school, I have to tell them I can’t, since you can hardly handle your job without me." She giggled, letting him know there was a protesting flush running up his neck. "I don't think they understand quite how cool you are. Personally, I think they're just jealous."

"Yeah, that must be it," Apollo said unconvincingly. He made an exaggerated show of looking both ways before crossing the street to the bike rack, so she didn't have to see his expression.

 

....

 

They got home so late that even Trucy -- whose idea of subtle was to pull a pink elephant out of a hat -- pressed a finger to her lips and tiptoed up the stairs to the Wright Anything Agency. The sound of her key scraping in the lock seemed louder than a piano hitting concrete, and when the door squealed upon opening, Apollo made a hasty mental note to oil it soon.

The front office was almost completely dark, sparing the glow from the microwave clock and the small pool of light emanating from the fish bowl she'd stolen from the Meraktic Clinic. He could barely make out the shape of Phoenix Wright, slumped over on one of the sofas, breathing slowly and evenly.

"Awww," Trucy murmured, with a note of tenderness that she never used when talking to him. "Daddy fell asleep waiting for me. I wonder if he remembered to feed the fish."

"Well, he routinely forgets to give me my paycheck, so I wouldn't be too sure about that."

"Polly," she admonished without bite. "Here, give me the Court Record. I'll keep it safe overnight." He handed it over. Placing it in one of the drawers with the weird locks, she went and pulled a blanket out from underneath a box of wooden spoons, and laid it lightly over her father's shoulders.

When she leaned down to press a gentle kiss to his temple, right underneath the brim of his hat, he suddenly came to life, snatching her securely around the waist and pulling her down to him with a triumphant, "Gotcha!" She shrieked loud enough to wake the dead.

"Daddy! You were fake sleeping! No fair!"

"And you weren't able to perceive it!" He wrestled her into a bear hug, and no matter how she squirmed, she couldn't get away. "I'll best you yet, Trucy!" He slapped a big, noisy kiss on her cheek.

"Gross!" she tried valiantly to lean away. "Stop it, Daddy. I'm in high school. I'm too busy for this."

"And I think you deserve kisses for that. Hmmmmm .... how about fifteen, for each year you've been alive?" Without waiting for an answer, he stole another kiss. Trucy wriggled and giggled, and got a big wet one planted on her ear for her trouble.

Realizing they were completely unaware he was still there, Apollo let the door fall shut with a quiet click and retreated noiselessly down the stairs.

 

....

 

They prowled the fish market at dawn on Thursday, searching for a man who might know the reason why a corpse was found swinging from a tree in his ex-wife's backyard. They'd tried to find him most of the previous night, but all his friends suggested they try here. He did like fresh fish. It was a school day, so Trucy was trying to finish something in a vocabulary workbook, frequently asking him to stop so she could use his back to fill in answers.

"Hey, demon boy," leered someone nearby, and though he couldn't locate him at first, Apollo knew the comment was directed at him. A man stood a few feet away, face hidden behind a scruffy, unkempt beard and an overpowering smell of cornchips and ashes. He held out a single rose. "Flower for your girlfriend? She's too pretty to be out here so early, boy. And she looks tired. I say you give her the flower and keep everything else to yourself."

Mortified, Apollo shook his head. "We're not --" he protested lamely, but it was too late.

"Ooooooooh!" Trucy squealed. "A rose? For me? Thank you!" She took it from the man, beaming wide enough to scrunch her eyes up like almonds. Then, in front of everyone, her face bathed in the rosy light of sunrise and its own inner glow, she leaned up and kissed Apollo square on the mouth.

 

....

 

He pulled up to the bike rack outside the district public school, behind the school buses and minivans like usual. Then he crossed around to the back of the building, to the high school exit. He waited at the bottom of the steps, arms folded. He wasn't sure what he was waiting for, but it was Trucy who had instilled in him to question others first, himself later.

"Hey!" someone called out to him suddenly. A girl propped open the door, a textbook clutched to her chest, her brow furrowed with concentration. "Aren't you that lawyer friend of Trucy Wright's?"

Something cold and gelatinous landed in Apollo's stomach, but it was too late to backtrack. "Yeah. That’s me."

"Why are you hanging around here?"

"I ... I wanted to talk to someone about her. I'm worried."

The girl's eyes narrowed to slits. She warred with herself for a moment; then, with a firm jerk of her shoulders, she jumped down the steps to him. She startled him, up close, by being much shorter than he'd anticipated. Not as short as Trucy, but Apollo was a good head taller than her, and he was by no means a towering man. The only other distinguishing feature about her, he noticed upon closer inspection (mousey brown hair, mousey brown eyes, clothing that neither followed nor deviated from the current fashion) was the necklace that hung at the hollow of her throat. Highlighted a pastel green, it resembled a comma or an underdeveloped fetus.

"There's a picture of you two in her locker," she said, arms slackening on her book -- which wasn't a textbook, but a advanced manual on the metaphysical. "That's how I recognized you."

"She feels alienated from her peers," Apollo returned. He wasn't sure exactly what it meant, but he'd heard it once on the radio and it sounded appropriate.

"Can't say I'm surprised," the girl said unkindly. "I've only heard unpleasant things about her since she moved up from the middle school building. And she's ... a little off-putting."

"And the ocean is just a _little_ wet."

She smiled, tossing her bangs out of her eyes. "My name's Pearl Fey. I'm a year above her, but we share a gym class. You might not remember what high school was like, Mr. Justice, but we see a lot more than you think we do in those changing rooms. And..." she faltered.

_Is this about her panties?_ he thought with dread. She seemed to be taking this entirely too seriously, if it really was about Trucy's noxious choice in undergarments.

Realizing it would have to be spelled out for him, the mousey girl -- Pearl-whatever -- inspected the ends of her nails disconcertedly. "Well. She's got ... she's got all those scratches on her ribs. And you know what kind of clothes she wears; even though she tries to hide them with her scarf, we can see her hickeys, clear as day. She complains about them, too. After all, they're nothing more than glorified bruises. They have to hurt."

Apollo swallowed against an arid throat.

"You know her better than I do, I'm sure, and I think ... I think there's an air of innocence to her, like she doesn't know exactly what we think of her for being like that. But nevertheless, she can't be any older than Mystic -- well, she's not at the legal age of consent." Her eyes flashed, and he got the sudden impression that if she could, she would be rolling up her sleeves. "She's only a kid. People shouldn't be doing that in high school. That's why none of her classmates want to get too close."

With more presence than any sixteen-year-old girl should possess, Pearl looked up at him. Her tone threatened. "And, of course, you would know better than I would, just how long you'll sit in jail if anyone finds out."

 

....

 

She shrieked with laughter, darting away from him into the office main, something shining clutching between her hands.

"For the love of .... !" he exclaimed, dropping his fork into the sink with a clatter and giving chase. "Trucy, give it back!"

Trucy ducked behind the coffee table, banging her knees against the wood and yelping. He made a wild grab at her, and she just barely danced out of reach of his fingers, grinning wide. There weren't any other places to run; she tried to dash underneath his arm, but he captured her on the second swipe. They teetered off balance, while she tried to conceal what he wanted behind her back, and then they went down. He twisted so that they landed on the sofa, her body caught securely against his. Still laughing, Trucy straddled his hips, pushing herself up so that no matter how he stretched, she still kept his bracelet aloft high above his head.

"Come on!" she teased him. "You're not even trying!"

His gut shuddered inside of him, as if he found himself on the edge of a building, looking down at crisscrossing asphalt and the promise of a very satisfying splat. One hand slithered around Trucy's waist, and in the next moment, his put his mouth on her neck, at the hollow of her throat, just beneath her scarf. She gave a little gasp, and although he was preoccupied with trailing hot, open-mouthed kisses along her collarbone, he could see her eyelids fluttering. She seemed flustered by the sudden attention, but not surprised.

"Polly," she murmured hoarsely, her hands slowly drifting down to feather upon the back of his neck.

Abruptly, Apollo disentangled himself from her and snatched his bracelet from her lax hands.

He was so busy crowing triumphantly and doing victory laps around the office, ignoring her as she admonished him, that he didn't notice Phoenix Wright, pressed up against the doorframe to the kitchen and looking roughly like he had been clubbed in the back of the head with a fire extinguisher.

 

....

 

Later that night, in the same fish-lit darkness, Apollo rose as silently as possible from the floor and edged over to the sofa where Trucy lay sprawled, one hand tucked underneath her cheek and hat askew.

Gingerly, not daring to breathe, he found the hem of her undershirt and rolled it up to expose the smooth, slim expanse of her back and one set of ribs. He reached out, trembling fingertips touching the four dark, red lines that arced up behind her kidneys, moving from them to another, fainter set just below them. There was no denying what they were. No wonder the girls in the locker rooms were suspicious; even in the darkness, he could see them very clearly. He fought the sudden urge to cry.

He lingered too long, and when she shifted, her clothing catching and tugging with his grip, he was instantly caught. She smiled at him drowsily and with faint confusion in her shadow-deepened features, like she expected to find someone else leaning over her. She extended one leg, tangling it around one of his, as casually as if she was looping her arm through his at a social gathering. "If you want something, Polly," she said, a little too sleepy to be coy. "All you have to do is say please."

_She's half-asleep,_ Apollo told himself sternly. _She doesn't know what she's saying._

Putting one hand on the back of the sofa to balance himself, he dropped his body down to hover over her. She leaned up willingly, and he's not sure what part of them touched first; her hips, twisting up to bump his, or their lips, meeting on the downstroke, but in an instant, he was gone. She wrapped her arms around his neck, fingers tangling in his already sleep-mussed hair with a childish giggle. He slipped his hands beneath her body, pulling her up into him, so that all the lines of her figure, chest and stomach and long thighs, met with his own. He pushed her head back against the arm of the sofa so he could better plunder her half-open mouth, sufficiently and thoroughly awakening her.

His fingers traced and then, unconsciously, lined up with the raised lines of her scratches.

 

....

 

Phoenix leaned over, filling his empty plastic cup with the last of the grape juice from his bottle.

"Thanks," Apollo said absently, flipping through a police record and wishing there was a Ctrl+F function for paper files. He was old enough to remember the days when people actually used computers as a reliable storage source. He couldn't believe he was actually admitting it to himself, but he liked old school better.

"She's everything to me."

It was said so quietly that at first it didn't register in Apollo's mind that Phoenix actually spoke. His head jerked up. His boss didn't look at him, chin downcast and his eyes hidden beneath the brim of his hat. The quirk to his lips like the end of a fishing hook was Apollo's only clue that he'd even spoke at all, and he was deathly serious. "Come again?"

"I don't think you're at the point of your career yet, Justice, where you can appreciate just how devastating it can be to lose it all." _I lost everything after I met you,_ Apollo grumbled inwardly, but had long ago learned not to interrupt Phoenix Wright. "So you won't really get it when I tell you that my daughter means everything to me. Everything I do these days, I do for her sake. Everything that I did, everything that happened to me, was because of her."

_That's a little unhealthy,_ Apollo thought, beginning to see where this was going and not liking it at all.

Phoenix looked up, a snap to his eyes like an icicle. "But I do think you're old enough to understand what exactly will happen to you if I found out you've done anything to her in any way. And I’m not entirely without resources; I can and I will find out if you’re hiding something." 

He smiled, and Apollo's skin crawled, because it was not the smile of an ace attorney, a lovingly loose-moraled boss, or even a concerned father, but the smile of a man who forged evidence in court, and who used a naive Apollo and an adoring Trucy, as cleverly as a ventriloquist pulls strings, to land his best friend behind bars.

 

....

 

He sat, knees tucked up against his chest. The wind stirred, waved his tendrils of hair above his forehead like reeds, and lifted Pearl Fey's straight, cedar-colored mane from the back of her neck. She plucked a piece of gravel up and pinched it between her fingers.

"I asked her," she said abruptly, tossing the rock out into the road. She sort of mumbled it, like she wasn't used to confessing. "I asked her about you."

_Is this what it feels like for my witnesses?_ Apollo wondered, trying to inconspicuously wipe his sweaty palms on his slacks. _To constantly feel like I'm about to be stripped naked and laughed at, or lose my lunch?_ He dug at his eyeballs, but it didn't help; the heels of his hands still tingled with the memory of her skin, his lips with hers, like she had left bits and pieces of herself crawling all over him. Pearl was right, Phoenix was right: he knew exactly where people like him were going to end up. "And?" he asked, without particularly wanting to hear the answer.

"I asked her if you had ever touched her in any inappropriate manner. She looked at me like I was an idiot, and said that no, you had never done anything to hurt her."

"You believe her?"

"I know when people are lying, Mr. Justice, and don't look at me like that. You and Trucy Wright aren't the only people in this town with supernatural powers." Her fingers hovered absently over the charm at her neck. "I saw no Psyche-Lockes on her."

She turned to face him, her head cocked and her face as serious as death. "So ... if it's not you, scratching her up like some wild, caged animal, then who is it?"

 

....

 

She dropped into the seat in the train compartment with a little bounce, plastering herself up against the window to wave out of it, as if she didn't take a train every day of her life. Apollo took advantage of her distraction to throw something boxy and heavy onto the storage above their heads.

"Come and wave to Daddy, Polly; he was nice enough to come and see us off," she laughed, turning to smile at him and in the same moment catching sight of his luggage. Her face twisted with confusion. "Polly? What are those for? We're just going up to the mountains to talk to that one family. It’s forty-five minutes, tops. You don't need all that stuff, silly."

Apollo took the seat beside her, wordlessly pulling his cell phone from his pocket and plugging his headphones in. He closed his eyes, but it didn't help; he still saw the scratches along her back on the inside of his eyelids. Resolve steeled inside his bones.

Trucy's voice became slightly hysterical; she stretched herself up onto tip-toe in her seat in order to examine the suitcases. "Polly! Why have you packed all our stuff? Where are we going? Polly! Answer me! Where are you taking me?"

Something that sounded like wailing guitars filled Apollo's ears. It was enough to drown her out. He reached up, seizing hold of the hem of her dress and pulling her down to sit beside him. She settled, her eyes narrowed and her breathing shallow. 

With a jolt, the train began to move. It was too late to jump off, and he couldn't help but feel a rush of relief move from the crown of his head to his toes. Trucy paled, but remained seated.

He leaned forward, looking around her and out the smudged, smoky window. Phoenix Wright stood on the platform, looking soft and harmless and homeless, waving forlornedly as the distance between them and him doubled and tripled.

_If it's not you, scratching her up like some wild, caged animal, then who is it?_ Pearl's voice echoed in his skull.

_Who indeed?_ Apollo watched Phoenix's figure fade away until it was nothing more than a speck of grey, and finally, even that blurred into nothing.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
